Outlook had been my main mail program up until the last year
or so when I switched to Entourage on the Mac. Outlook 2003 is supposed to be
a major update to the program, one it has been in the need of for the last couple
of years.

Manage and Prioritize Your Communication

Organize information better to help save time and be more
productive.

Manage all your e-mail in one place.
Access, send, and receive e-mail messages from multiple accounts—including
work, personal, or Web-based e-mail accounts such as MSN® Hotmail®—within
a single view.

Print less, read more. Outlook
2003 makes it easier and more comfortable to read e-mail messages online,
including long messages. The Reading Pane has been moved to the right side
of the screen to display twice as much content and reduce scrolling when you
read long messages online.

Save time and find messages faster.
Find e-mail messages more easily by grouping messages by date, size, conversation,
subject, importance, or other criteria.

Organize your Inbox. You no
longer have to keep all e-mail messages in your Inbox to remind you of action
items. Instead, use Quick Flags to flag messages by priority or time sensitivity
and find them in whichever folder they reside.

Automatically organize messages and receive reminders.
Enhanced Rules and Alerts organize incoming e-mail messages according to your
preferences and can automatically trigger alerts to remind or alert you when
needed—such as when tasks are due or meetings are about to begin.

Find messages easily. Save
the results of commonly used searches as Search Folders instead of having
to re-run common searches each time you need them. Search Folders provide
an automated way to keep relevant e-mails together, without moving them to
other folders. Search Folders require a connection to Microsoft Exchange Server
2003, Exchange 2003, or Exchange 5.5.

Access your Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks quickly.
Use the new Navigation Pane (or click Go on the menu bar), to access
your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Folders, Shortcuts, and Journal and find the
information you need to answer e-mail messages, schedule appointments, and

Let Outlook 2003 Do Work for You

Outlook 2003 can help you get the information you need—and
block the information you don't need—to stay productive.

Block unwanted attachments.
To help prevent unwanted attachments and bulky files from taking up too much
storage space, Outlook 2003 blocks e-mail messages and files from people not
on your Safe Senders List. After you examine and approve the message, Outlook
2003 downloads the full message and file.

Read e-mail messages regardless of the connection.
The new Cached Exchange Mode downloads messages and other Outlook 2003 data
to your computer so you can remain productive during network downtime. Cached
Exchange Mode requires a connection to Exchange Server 2003.

Connection awareness. Indicate
if you have a fast or slow connection—or have Outlook 2003 detect it for you.
Outlook 2003 adapts its performance by displaying either a preview of a message
or the full message, depending on the network speed.

Find facts quickly. No need
to leave your e-mail to do research—the new Research task pane brings electronic
dictionaries, thesauruses, and online research sites into Outlook 2003 so
that you can find information and incorporate it into your messages. Some
functionality in the Research task pane requires a connection to the Internet.
Learn more about how to
do research and reference in Office 2003 Editions.

Work with Others More Easily

Work together better and help protect against the misuse and
unwanted distribution of key company information.

Communicate instantly with others.
No need to leave Outlook 2003 to find out if an instant messaging (IM) contact
is online. Initiate IM conversations quickly in messages, Contacts, Calendar,
and other areas in Outlook 2003.

Control distribution of sensitive work.
Help protect your company assets by preventing recipients from forwarding,
copying, or printing important e-mail messages by using information rights
management (IRM) functionality. You can even specify an expiration date for
the message, after which it cannot be viewed or otherwise acted upon. IRM
functionality requires Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 running Microsoft Windows®
Rights Management Services (RMS).Note With Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, you can
use Outlook 2003 to create IRM-protected e-mail messages and grant others
permission to access and modify your e-mail messages. You can also apply policy
templates to IRM-protected e-mail messages you create. With Microsoft Office
Standard Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003, and Microsoft
Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 you can read IRM-protected e-mail
messages; with permission, you can modify them as well.

Work together better. Save
e-mail message attachments to shared workspaces where other team members can
get the latest versions, check files in or out, or even save task lists, related
files, links, and member lists. You can even tell whether team members are
online and then use IM to send them a message. Shared workspaces require Windows
Server 2003 running Microsoft Windows SharePoint™ Services.

Spend less time coordinating schedules.
Access shared team calendars in Outlook 2003 and view multiple calendars side
by side to make scheduling meetings fast and more convenient. You can view
your own work and personal calendars, calendars in Windows SharePoint Services,
or the calendars of others who have granted you viewing rights. Sharing team
calendars requires Windows Server 2003 running Windows SharePoint Services.

Go mobile. If you own and
use a Tablet PC, you can use ink markup to annotate e-mail messages in your
own handwriting with a pen input device. You can write notes for personal
use or e-mail messages to send to others.

The main look of Outlook 2003 has changed quite a bit, it
looks much cleaner than it has been before, will more information available
to you in one place. The reading pane (or preview pane as some of you may know
it) now defaults to the right hand side of the screen, this means you can now
read more of your e-mail that comes as you no longer have to scroll so much,
personally I don't make much use of it as I prefer to just open e-mail the old
way, but I understand why people like it, and moving it over to the right instead
of underneath your inbox works really well, making it much easier to read e-mails.

Organising and filtering mail has become a much easier task
with Outlook 2003, and it now allows you to arrange your inbox messages by conversation
(threaded) so you can read e-mails that related to a certain topic, this is
really good when you want to go back through your e-mail and delete old messages
you no longer want hanging around. So another good addition.

Now onto the majorly improved junk mail filter - this works
very well, almost as well as the one on Apple's Mail program, right away you
have it set up for junk mail removal, this is the limited version which filters
out the most easy to find spam and shoves it into an easy to delete junk mail
folder, this folder allows you to scan through just incase anything slips through
that shouldn't have, although with the low setting used as default I have never
had any mistaken spam slip through. There are varying degrees of protection
from none, to safe senders list only - which means you will only receive mail
from people on your safe senders list.

Next up we have e-mail blocking and image blocking, both of
these are excellent additions in my view, especially the image blocking. This
prevents spam e-mails of a pornographic nature being read by anyone who shouldn't
be looking at them, or by someone who doesn't want to - Outlook prevents the
images being download from the internet unless you ask it to, you can also add
the name of the sender to either your safe e-mail list or to junk mail so you
don't have to receive them again. It works well.

As mentioned earlier, Outlook 2003 helps stop incoming messages
containing viruses. You can choose when to load Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
content in an e-mail message and block unsolicited attachments from communicating
back to their servers, helping to protect your privacy. Again if you add people
to your safe senders list then you can read your attachments without bother.

Another addition to Outlook 2003 is the research task pane.
The Research library interface integrates into nearly all of of the Office 2003
Applications, Word 2003, Excel 2003, Outlook 2003, PowerPoint 2003 and Publisher
2003 can all make use of it. The research pane allows users to search reference
materials, internet sites, Encarta, thesaurus. But not only can you do that,
you can also add your own services to the research pane if you have someone
who can develop one for your company.

So say you do a search for "Windows", you can choose to search
books, Encarta, msn search etc to get all of the results put into one place,
but it gets better. If you have a word in your e-mail that you don't understand
or want to know more about - just right click on it and then click on "Look
Up" this puts up the Research Panel and it automatically searches the word out
for you. It works really well and is an excellent addition to the Office package.

There are a few other additions work mentioning even though
they are small little updates like the new pop-up announcements that let you
know of new e-mail that has arrived, similar to that of the MSN Messenger pop-ups
that inform you of messages and friends coming online. This pop-up lets you
read the e-mail or quickly delete it.

The calendar has been improved too thanks to the fact that
you can now view multiple calendars next to your own calendar. The calendars
scroll together and are colour-coded and labeled to help you quickly compare
schedules or schedule meetings. After you open another person's calendar, it
is added to the Calendar pane in the Navigation Pane, where you can select the
check box next to the person's name to show or hide his or her calendar.

The calendar view has also been improved and you can now view
multiple calendars at once. In this view, the TaskPad is hidden (but can be
easily shown by clicking TaskPad on the View menu), and the Date Navigator now
is displayed in the Navigation Pane. A new indicator make it easy to quickly
see the current day and time.

We also have Information Rights Management making its way
into Outlook 2003. E-mail messages with restricted permission. Information
Rights Management (IRM) in Outlook allows you to create messages with restricted
permission to help prevent messages from being forwarded, printed, copied, or
edited by unauthorized people. The sender clicks Do Not Forward on the Standard
toolbar to restrict permission for the message.

What else is there? Well you can now have a signature per
account, so every different e-mail account have use one. You can add photos
to all your contacts. There is Tablet PC support. I'm sure there are lots I
haven't mentioned too.

There is no doubt in my mind, that out of all of the Office
Systems programs, Outlook 2003 has had the most improvement, its finally fast,
easy to use and full of features that just about everyone will use.